Archive for the ‘Empowerment’ Category

At Wherever the Need we have always made it clear that sanitation should come first, because the only sustainable way to address issues of poverty is to tackle them at the point at which they originate.
Whilst education is of critical importance to improving lives and alleviating poverty, effective learning can only take place when students are well enough to attend school and concentrate in lessons. But it ...

The World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children's Fund in their 2012 Joint Monitoring Programme report estimated that over 1/3 of the world's population do not have access to adequate sanitation. The WHO also estimates that 1.4 million children are dying from diarrhoeal disease every year, the vast majority of which is due to inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene; yet access to sanitation is one of the most ...

Well known BBC newsreader and presenter Fiona Bruce is the voice-over for our latest film, "Independence, not Dependence". The video gives an introduction to who we are, what we do and why we do it. We believe in creating the conditions to allow people to become empowered and independent in their way out of poverty, not becoming dependent upon foreign aid. Find out more by watching the ...

"When 22-year-old Piyush Goyal posted his complaint of garbage spilling over from the dump in his area, on the Facebook page of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), little had he expected the civic agency to take action within 24 hours. But it did, pleasantly surprising Goyal.
MCD launched its Facebook page earlier this month to ensure effective monitoring of garbage lifting at areas under its jurisdiction. The ...

"This Tuesday, International Women's Day will focus our attention on the struggle that millions still face against injustice and discrimination. In an impassioned essay, Mariella Frostrup argues that the fight for women's rights is far from over.
In the western world the greatest triumph of spin in the last century is reflected in attitudes to feminism. Our struggle for emancipation and equality has been surreptitiously rewritten as a ...

"Young women are part of a campaign to bring much-needed social change and improve sanitation facilities
If you don't have a toilet at home, you might not get a bride in India. In a silent revolution of sorts, Indian women across the country, especially in rural and semi-urban areas, have a single condition before they agree to a match – the groom must have a toilet in his ...

Though this talk is a few years old, there are many points which are still extremely relevant, especially in light of the recent debates on whether the UK should be giving aid to India.
"Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former finance minister of Nigeria, sums up four days of intense discussion on aid versus trade on the closing day of TEDGlobal 2007, and shares a personal story explaining her own ...

"Empowering local communities to solve their own problems is the best way to improve health across the continent".
The Guardian rightly addresses the issue that good development must incorporate community empowerment. Without the local demand for sanitation, the facilities will not be used or properly maintained. This would have been a good opportunity for the Guardian to look at alternative sanitation facilities to latrines; ecological sanitation is a ...

A manual scavenger carries a tin of human waste from a dry latrine. Photo: BBC
“The worst thing is that the baskets we carry the waste in, often leak and drips down over your clothes”, manual scavenger Lakshmi Devi from rural Bihar tells BBC correspondent Mike Thomson. All her seven children are boys who clean out sewage tanks for their work. Manual removal of excreta (night soil) from ...

November 19th is World Toilet Day. Join the Big Squat!
A day to celebrate the importance of sanitation and raise awareness for the 2.6 billion people (nearly half of the world's population) who don't have access to toilets and proper sanitation.
Where there are no toilets:
2.6 billion people worldwide are without access to proper sanitation, which risks their health, strips their ...

After more than 15 years of debate on the issue, the UN has passed a resolution declaring "the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights".
The 192-member Assembly also called on UN Member States and international organisations to offer funding, technology and other resources to help poorer countries scale ...